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Comedic Relief She maybe a funny girl, but her “Maysoon’s Kids” is no laughing matter. Asha Toulmin meets Palestinian stand-up comic Maysoon Zayid.
“I tried to think about people who have succeeded who weren’t conventional, who weren’t like Jennifer Aniston.”
M
aysoon Zayid was watching television and saw something that moved her from New Jersey to Gaza. It was a news report during the Second Intifada. A cameraman zoomed in on a wheelchair, crushed by rubble. “I thought, oh no, we’re creating an entire generation of disabled children in a society that doesn’t know how to deal with them, in a part of the world that
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doesn’t know what to do with them,” she spays. Zayid founded “Maysoon’s Kids” in April 2001 and headed to Gaza with the beginnings of a plan to help. An established Arab-American comedian, at first she wanted to use the arts and humour to tackle disability issues. “I went out very naïve, thinking that I could use art therapy, rap and all these things to help these kids
“We’re creating an entire generation of disabled children in a society that doesn’t know how to deal with them” and wounded refugee children – it started out with seven kids, four of whom are now in university. Zayid won’t let a child into kindergarten unless she can guarantee all twelve years of schooling is paid for – just in case people don’t find her comedy funny one day, she says. She would hate to pull a kid out of school. Zayid’s latest project is enrolling kids into the first integrated disabled public school in Ramallah. “They need education first. We do work with film, editing and all that. But on the side, where I go to work with the kids and I get that itch. Then I’ll ask can I teach them a comedy workshop just because I want to,” she says. Zayid does the work herself, to make sure the funds go exactly where they’re supposed to, raising money through Facebook and special events. Recently she performed a stand-up show in New Jersey as a benefit for Playgrounds for Palestine. In return Playgrounds for Palestine will build the first disabled accessible playground in Gaza.
Overcoming obstacles
survive what they were living and when I got there I realised they needed something much more like basic education, physical therapy equipment, shoes. So it shifted quickly into a scholarship and wellness program that would promote normalising children and allowing them to go to schools and universities,” she explains. Maysoon’s Kids works with all types of disabled
Zayid wants to be the Arab Oprah. She performed the first ever stand-up show in the Middle East. She recently appeared on the Doha Debates in their first ever comedy debate, arguing that women are superior to men. But it’s not just her success that makes her an inspiration. Zayid has cerebral palsy herself. And she’s had to deal with her fair share of challenges in becoming who she is today. “It’s extremely difficult to get work if you’re an ethnic actress but it’s impossible to get work if you’re disabled. So as a disabled ethnic actress I had no shot,” she says. It wasn’t that Zayid was turned away after her auditions. She wasn’t even getting a chance to audition in the first place. “I tried to think about people who have succeeded who weren’t conventional, who weren’t like Jennifer Aniston. Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O’Donnell – these are big comedians who didn’t look the part but got great jobs acting because they were comedians and that was their ‘in’. So I decided to start doing comedy as a way to define myself and to get into film and television and it worked.”
Arab-American identity At Zayid’s third stand-up show she met Dean
Obeidallah who co-founded the New York Arab American comedy festival with her in 2003. The festival showcases sketch comedy as well as stand-up. For the first time the group had an all-Arabic show this year. “We came up with this idea of doing a festival in order to not only humanise Arabs in America post 9/11 but also introduce the concept of Arab actors to Hollywood,” she says, explaining that most Hollywood roles for Arab women consist of wearing a burqa and crying, while for men roles are making those women cry. “We really got a chance to shift what people thought was Arab. Also, because we have Arab writers writing the sketches and Arab performers performing, we got to say look at all the different ranges of roles they can play.” Zayid was born and raised in an Italian Catholic town. Apart from her family’s annual trips to Palestine, people assumed she was Italian. It wasn’t until her high school years and the second Intifadah when people started noticing her actual ethnic identity. “I was in high school and Iraq got invaded. I wasn’t okay and people were like ‘why do you care?’ and I was like well first of all they’re human beings, second of all this is the Arab world. That’s when ‘I’m Arab they’re American’ started to really come to the surface,” she says. “I think because there’s so many Palestinians living in the Diaspora all over the globe so many of us feel such a deep, deep, deep connection to the Middle East and such a deep connection to Palestine. Then when we come here people look at us as American, they call us other.” It took Zayid three to four years to build up her reputation in the camps as more than an American. Now she claims to be part of the fabric and later this year she will head back to Gaza. She will interact with the kids, showcase her comedy and teach the mothers how to deal with their child’s lifelong disability. “The most important part of it to me is teaching the moms. ‘Hey! Your kid has cerebral palsy don’t give them coke, they’re already shaking they don’t need to be bouncing off the walls’, and you wouldn’t believe how difficult that is,” she says. “To be able to talk to moms and say hey can you look at me? Because if you can look at me your kid can do this. So let’s do this.” 2010 August
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